Typical electrical connectors include housings normally of insulating material and having a plurality of cavities or passages into which male or female terminals are inserted. In a hard wired connector, each terminal normally is pre-crimped to a wire conductor and then inserted into a housing cavity where it is retained in place by a locking structure. Typically the locking structure may include resilient tangs or latch projections which engage shoulders on the housing within the cavity. Mating plug and socket housings then can be joined in order to interconnect mating male and female terminals mounted in the housings, or the housings might be joined with other terminal supporting devices.
Although connectors of the character described above have been successfully used for many years, unreliable interconnections between the terminals can occur in some instances. For example, a terminal may not be fully inserted into its housing cavity during assembly whereby the locking structure is not effective to secure the terminal in place. When the terminal is joined with a mating terminal, the incompletely mounted terminal can be pushed out of position so that the interconnection between terminals is not made. In addition, even if a connection is made initially, a terminal can subsequently work loose because of vibrations or other extraneous forces and cause a faulty or intermittent connection. Consequently, a variety of systems have been designed wherein a separate terminal locking member is employed on the connector housing to act as either a primary or a second locking means. These locking members are inserted longitudinally or laterally into the connector housing.
One of the problems with employing a separate terminal locking member on the connector housing is that separate latch means often are required to prevent the locking member from simply falling off of the housing. For instance, exterior latch arms, such as cantilevered latch arms, often are used on the locking member for embracing the housing and engaging appropriate latch bosses on the outside of the housing. Such latch means add to the overall size or envelope of the housing which often is undesirable. This increased size or envelope of the overall connector further is compounded if the connector, itself, is inserted into a shroud, for instance. Because of the exterior latch arms of the terminal locking member, the shroud becomes enlarged and increases the overall size or envelope of the overall assembly. Some connectors solve this problem by moving the latch means or arms of the TPA to the interior of the connector housing. However, this often is not a real solution, because there was insufficient room within the housing in the first instance, and the net result is that the housing, itself, is expanded to accommodate the interior latch means and, therefore, results in enlarging the connector envelope anyway.
The present invention is directed to solving the above problems by providing a unique terminal locking member which includes a locking component which performs the dual function of locking the terminal in the housing as well as latching the terminal locking member in the housing.